P.S. Most important Emacs shortcuts: Ctrl-g - end minibuffer editing, if any; Ctrl-x Ctrl-c - exit Emacs. Ctrl-g you need because often, after entering shortcut from another text editor, you might end-up in Emacs minibuffer (internal command line). Ctrl-x Ctrl-c will not work in minibuffer - so you need to press Ctrl-g. After exiting Emacs, type in shell "vim" and press Enter to start real text editor ^_^

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

In mid-90's, there was such a hype about Emacs, that I decided to give it a serious try. But I made no progress for weeks. Finally, with the advent of the Internet, I realized I was not alone in thinking that emacs was a bloated monstrosity, and that pretty much everyone hated emacs.

I realized I was not alone in thinking that emacs was a bloated monstrosity, and that pretty much everyone hated emacs.

That's bit harsh.

In my experience most emacs users do not care. They got their .emacs.el from somebody else. They know tiny fraction of its capabilities. But it mostly works.

I have met a guy few weeks ago who uses Emacs for past 6+ years. But since he always used X version, he didn't even knew the shortcut to exit Emacs. And to exit console version of Emacs he was simply reopening terminal.

VIM is editor for people who like to learn from the editor they use. Learn - to be more efficient and more experienced. And you can learn a lot from VIM.

Not so much from VI - and it is important to draw the distinction between the two. VI had set important standard for small yet powerful text editors. VIM is just built on the standard, expanding possibilities further.

Emacs also sets its own standard. Yet, most of its clones remain in the shadow. It is hard - if possible - to expand Emacs functionality. And after fixing biggest usability issues it would stop being Emacs and would become something like WordStar clone.

On fresh installation of HP-UX and Solaris you end up with 'vi' being only editor on the whole system. Solaris didn't bothered to fix it and vi there bears proud marking that it wasn't updated since 1996. HP-UX before 11.31 was in the same state. vi in 11.31 finally(!!) started supporting keyboard: arrow, page keys.